Alternate audience measurement currencies, the Joint Industry Committee, and WideOrbit

For as long as we've been talking about linear and digital convergence, we have also been talking about the need for a common audience measurement currency. That conversation has taken on added urgency with the recent formation of the Joint Industry Committee (JIC). Comprised of media agencies, premium video programmers, streaming platforms, and trade bodies, the JIC's stated purpose is to accelerate measurement innovation at scale.

Initially confined to a few broadcast networks and cable TV companies, audiences are now fragmented across multiple platforms and service providers, both subscription and ad-supported, each with their own audience data. Add new and emerging audience measurement providers into the mix, each with their own methodology and data sources, and it becomes increasingly difficult to know who is watching what and on which platform.

For many years, Nielsen has been considered the universal source of truth for audience measurement, with upstart Comscore entering the fray in 1999. Linear, broadcast TV is still largely transacted based on gross ratings points (GRPs), derived from panel-based data, compiled from a sample of hundreds of viewers and then extrapolated to the 240+ million viewers in the US. But with audiences now spread across hundreds of distribution end points, the small data sets of traditional ratings measurements are proving to be both inadequate and inaccurate, leading to the emergence of alternate currencies for enhanced linear-digital measurement and reporting, such as VideoAmp, iSpot.tv, and more.

But those alternate currencies come with their own challenges, for both buyers and sellers. For example, advertisers may want proposals in a certain currency, requiring networks to guarantee proposals against the advertiser's currency of choice, while both buyer and seller may be using transactional systems that don't support that particular currency.

Ultimately, advertisers want to know what they bought, what was delivered, who it was delivered to, and what the outcome was. But depending on who's compiling and reporting on the data, advertisers can end up struggling to compare GRPs to impressions to views to completed views, basically comparing apples and oranges to bananas and cumquats.

LINK:	https://www.wideorbit.com/blog/joint-industry-committee/...
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